Alejandro Carrion Aguirre (1915-1992)

NEW LANDSCAPE LIGHT

It may be that the beauty of landscapes

exists only in our eyes:

Tomorrow, no other landscape will be seen

than a church in flames,

and then we shall have lost the count

of clenched hands:

for we shall have risen by then

and sown with our cries

that field which before was the realm of silence only.

A hundred million bullets will have sped

to explore the breasts of a hundred million men,

and we shall see the crumbling battalions fall

like kernels of corn.

Beside what was once a house

a deaf child, entranced, will watch

a rose of blood blossoming upon a breast

from the narrow cranny of a wound.

(No longer sweet landscapes,

no longer songs of birds to beguile our hunger,

no longer pods singing the beauty of the stars

and the gay curves of riggish females).

We shall all have gone back to the earth

and we shall feel that our roots are growing into it.

And while the fanes burn red, color of blood,

since the seed of that flame will have sprung from our very hearts,

our lips will sing a strong hymn of total owning,

of endless joy, above that new earth

that will have flowered as never before,

made fertile by a hundred million dead.

Then,

men and machines,

in their eyes an unknown new light,

their breasts swollen with the recent song,

shall march, gravely, through the falling dusk,

searching for silence.

Equador

[D.F.]

Roberto Tejada

Dyspnea

 

For days to situate the flesh in whose inadequate precinct

motionless: a monolith of the often spoken

of which nothing is

certain: or abstract of whose gender to the use

of all acknowledged desire formal

parlance & pronoun

to form the stars across your back: whose hardened

muscle: tremendous lateral delta

of which to the shoulders:

there is a way from yes: the very inside an eternal

tick of the left eye: a language

not only illegible as

the vain translation of a fictive contradictory

self & its consonant verb to be:

but the body’s crystal

falling through a grey film of failed memory

& brushfire this Autumn midnight:

to unfold (in the form

of your body) pleasured corners of a place

in which the difficult new breathing

and I are foreigners

David Huerta

Heaven’s Kitchen

Heaven's kitchen is supplied with infernal utensils,
sagging, lilac-coloured cauldrons, fat forks
between whose prongs are tangled strings
of archangels' spit and frayed voices
that rose from the left-hand shirt of God.
A soup was being cooked when Love appeared,
a rare broth sprinkled with flaming scriptures
and glints of seaside holidays. The oil became fire,
seeped into the skin and stayed, vigorous,
iridescent, in the eyes of the blessed.
The elaborate coven stopped work: elongated odours
invaded the heavenly kitchen; pure spices
for the feverish construction of Spring
and its rippling; Aprils whose flowers are teeth,
whose jaws are crammed with dragonflies;
Eros's entire wardrobe for the Salad
with its curled coiffure; the brilliance of stabbed embraces
and the sea of hands, blue as can be, multiplying.

Willard Pomare-Escalona

TAKE YOUR FREEDOM

Is freedom given? Is freedom taken?
Should San Andres sit, sit like the beggar?
Beg for freedom, beg to get better,
Or defy the oppressor, and our soul deliver.

Take your freedom, take it now!
For only beggars have no choice,
But we not beggars, we not dumb,
Take your freedom, take it now.

Take your freedom, it will be rough, 
Speak it , walk it, sing it loud,
At freedom table, sit and chow, 
Take your freedom, make it known.

Take your freedom, take it now!
With prison jail, chain and bars,
Just but few steps, from freedom hall,
Take your freedom, take it all.

Take your freedom, take it all!
Some may say, we will not thrive,
The sea the land blessed, God will provide,
Take your freedom, take it boy!

Take your freedom, take your land!
No more the oppressor, chain our hands,
Nicaragua or Colombia, none we want,
Take your freedom, take it man.

If take not freedom, but candy bars,
Come with offers, low wages brought,
And lies repeated, believe them all,
You’re still slave minded, get freedom y’all.

Take your freedom, and life preserve,
Endure the hardship, with death sentence roam,
Like great Mandela, in South Africa endured,
Take your freedom, free those who’ll come.

Take your freedom, from oppressors hand,
Nicaragua Colombia, distress our land, 
Are both slave drivers, from Spain they learned,
Take your freedom, it’s God’s command.

Rafael Pantino (b.1947)

THE BALLAD OF THE JEALOUS MAN

If the hoopoe commands a flock of flights
The jealous man frowns and extends his delirium,
If his love swims in the stillness of the alabaster
The jealous man turns his bony wheel

What will carry me away — he asks himself —
Perhaps the sparkling of the young Caucasian
Which inhabits me between short breaths . . .

The mastiff that barks in the quarry of being
What else does it announce but the lover’s cut-off head?

He who squeezes his nocturne
And drains his glance on the rampart of the day
He has truly no fervor nor dreams nor rest
Ten young men swim naked
In the dark pond of his eyes
Since the jealous man amuses himself sucking his blood
While phantoms copulate
In the dark lava of his fate

Ramon de Valle-Inclán (1866-1936)

Eastern Rose
A feline grace is hers when walking,
profound echoes fill her form,
her dark mouth with Moorish fraud
lisps such tales as of Aladdin.
Her eyes are black, sultry, wily,
her smile is sad with ancient lore,
her flowery skirt's a sough of spells
of Indian and of sacred store.
In an Eastern garden her hand plucked
the apple of the sanctioned tree,
and the Serpent, coiling round her breasts,
bestows on lust a sacred sense.
In the limpid darkness of her eyes
the light is a sibilation.

 

Charles Beaudelaire (1821-1867)

EVENING HARMONY
by: Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

 

he hour approacheth, when, as their stems incline,

The flowers evaporate like an incense urn,

And sounds and scents in the vesper breezes turn;

A melancholy waltz—and a drowsiness divine.




The flowers evaporate like an incense urn,

The viol vibrates like the wailing of souls that repine.

A melancholy waltz—and a drowsiness divine,

The skies like a mosque are beautiful and stern.




The viol vibrates like the wailing of souls that repine;

Sweet souls that shrink from chaos vast and etern,

The skies like a mosque are beautiful and stern,

The sunset drowns within its blood-red brine.




Sweet souls that shrink from chaos vast and etern,

Essay the wreaths of their faded Past to entwine,

The sunset drowns within its blood-red brine,

Thy thought within me glows like an incense urn.